There’s a point in a company’s trajectory where quality becomes more important that quantity (speaking specifically of software features here). Early on it usually makes sense to throw things at a wall and see what sticks. But once there’s a sense of product market fit, the engineering org needs to buckle down and focus on doing things slow, methodically, and correct.

There’s also engineers that prefer doing these different kinds of work. They thrive on quick wins and kudos from founders. Early engineers probably need to be ok with bugs and edge cases that they’ll never go back and fix. Personally I don’t like doing work like that, but I’m definitely in the second class of engineers who needs systems to be modular, composable, and well defined.